Men who lack female supervision

By RICHARD SHAWSun Advocate publisher

A couple of weeks or so ago my wife sent me an email at work entitled "Men who lack female supervision." At first the half dozen images attached made me laugh. One was of a guy making biscuits in the big bowl using a half inch drill to drive the beater to make the batter. Another portrayed a guy trying to trim his big hedges with his garden tractor suspended from a crane. Another, and my favorite, was a huge living room with hard wood floors and a Harley sitting in the middle of it. There was also a four wheeler there, but what made it really funny was that the room was full of smoke and there were black donut burnout marks on the hardwood floor. The smoke in the air wasn't from someone lighting up a Camel either.

As the day wore on all the women in the office got a big kick out of the images. They all had knowing looks on their face about dumb things men sometimes do. As I watched I began to wonder if this actually wasn't a real message from my wife. At the end of the day, as I drove home, I decided to confront her about it. It didn't take long.

"Wasn't that email I sent you funny?" she said as I walked through the back door and into the kitchen.

"It was kind of like stereotypical, wasn't it?" I asked politely.

"I thought you would think those photos were funny," she said.

"Well, I guess they would have been, if it hadn't had the title it did," I said. "In of themselves, they were hilarious. But what makes you think women don't do weird and stupid things sometimes."

The mood in the room grew a little cooler. Actually I could have turned off the swamp cooler on that 97 degree day, and I wouldn't have noticed a difference.

"You have to admit men do a lot more stupid things than women do," she said.

"I guess that depends on what you qualify as stupid," I said.

All three house dogs which had been milling around my feet and wanting to be petted had now felt the chill and were hiding under the kitchen table, not making a peep. Besides they were all girls too, so I know who they would side with.

"What's wrong with you?" she asked. "Did that really offend you?"

I stood there for a moment weighing all the answers I could give, the ones the could keep me out of trouble, the ones that would get me into more trouble and the ones that would mean the death penalty.

"I just think that jokes about gender are not, well, very well taken these days," I said. "I mean if I say something about female drivers or dumb girls you always give me the stink eye."

Stink eye was a term my wife and I picked up from our favorite romantic movie of all time, "Forget Paris." Okay, now I am going to hear it from some guys...I've said it. I have a favorite chick flick.

She just shrugged and went into the living room and sat down with her iPad and started playing one of those girl games.

By now the dogs had snuck in there, but as I entered they left again, headed toward the bathroom where they know we would never get in a fight. The room is too small for me to wave my arms around, thus injuring myself.

"I just felt like you were commenting about me when you sent it to me," I said all touchy, feely like I have been told women like you to be. I was showing her my feminine side.

She looked up from the screen with blocks and weird birds flying around it.

"That wasn't about you," she said calmly. "I just thought you would think it was funny. You are always talking about how women are superior to men in so many ways. It was just a joke."

Now she had done it. She had used my own sense of liberal thought against me.

"Hey, I bet I could just drive right around Carbon County and find bonehead things women are doing as good as the ones in those photos," I said, knowingly throwing a concept out there that I could never fulfill. She did too and called my bluff.

"I will give you a week," she said. "If you can find five stupid things that women are in the process of doing, and document it on film in the local area I will apologize. Otherwise, as far as I am concerned you are just being a....well that term I used about you when you had that meltdown on the camping trip a few weeks ago."

She went back to her I-Pad and said nothing else.

So for the last few days I have been trying to find really stupid (or even somewhat stupid) things that were being done by women in the community. I began to roam the streets at all hours of the day, searching and hoping to find that stupidity on display. However, not much came of it.

I did manage to create a couple of bad situations though. At one point I drove by a woman who was stopped on the side of the road and was trying to get the hood of her minivan up. I thought, "Hey here's a photo. Anyone can get the hood of a minivan up."

So I stopped and took a picture of her from across the road. She saw me and looked pretty angry. Then she said

"Some gentleman you are," she yelled across the road.

My inner self admitted at that point I was being the word that my wife and referred to in her comments during the dicussion we had had the night this all started. I got out of my truck and went over to help. She had flipped the latch inside the cab of the vehicle, but the hood still wouldn't raise. I looked all over for the secondary latch and couldn't find one. I couldn't get it open either. A 14 year old kid was passing by on his bike and he stopped. He reached under the grill and the hood popped up.

"Now there's a real man," said the woman, pulling herself away from a phone conversation she was having with someone long enough to insult me. I never found out why she wanted under the hood, because I turned tail and left. She was probably on the phone calling someone to come beat me up.

After I drove away I began to think; where would women act the dumbest. I compiled a list. Rock concerts, wet T-Shirt contests, Chipendale shows, new babies that show up anywhere and well...shopping. Being that there were no men strip clubs in town, that no wet T-Shirt contests were being given and that new babies were hard to come by for an experiment such as this, I thought I would go to a couple of the stores in the area and watch.

I was wrong. I didn't see one woman acting goofy shopping, even in the shoe sections of stores. I came away despondent. After a week I had to admit to my wife it is true.